


Everybody Floods To Their Ideal Place

by GodIPitytheViolins (orphan_account)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: BBC Sherlock - Freeform, Gen, London, Mind Palace, Mnemonic device, Pre Study in Pink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-16
Updated: 2012-06-16
Packaged: 2017-11-07 20:57:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/435364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/GodIPitytheViolins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Sherlock moves to London.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everybody Floods To Their Ideal Place

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by "These Streets", Paulo Nutini.  
> There was come confusion over possessive apostrophes. But I went without, in the end.  
> Absolutely miniscule reference to drugs. It's pretty much just the word "Drugs".   
> Unbeta'd, etc.

 

When he first moved to London, he fell in love.

 

He’d been to the city before, but living there seemed more consistent, more intimate. He’d never felt so isolated in such a crowded place. It was wonderful. He wanted the whole city for himself. He wanted the skyline to call to him, winking as the sun shone each day. He wanted the trees in the parks to rustle for him, proclaiming, as he passed by. He wanted the lights to shine for him, and the streets to hum for him and the whole city to sway for him when he asked it to.

He wanted its people to be his, to contemplate, to judge, to dismiss. He learned the ebb and flow, following the currents of the different classes, moving fluidly between them, ignoring awkward societal boundaries set by wealth and race and gender.

He saw the smugness in the faces of those with everything, whose clothes screamed of money, the cash dripping off their designer bodies. He felt the smirks of those who were beautiful and knew it, who wanted others to know they knew it, and so took every opportunity to inflict their opinions of themselves on the surrounding populace. There, gliding in and out of their care-free lives, he learned the sound of affluence.

He saw the contentedness in the smiles of those with enough – mouths forming soft lines, as they knew they could live happily as long as they locked away some of their bigger, more extravagant dreams. He felt the small satisfactions take the hand of the frustrations, could hear them as they compromised, balancing the lives of those in the middle – a struggle sometimes, but it worked.

He saw the regret in the eyes of those with nothing. He felt the anger, whether it was forced inward and buried, or turned outward and shoved toward him, eating away at the tired shoulders lining the walls of smaller lanes. The sound of injustice was confrontational and overwhelming, harmonizing with cruel bitterness.

 

There were drugs, but that was good. The longer he spent coked up in his city, the more he departed from the ranks of the privileged and fell in line with those who were lost, scrounging for a purpose, a reason to keep inhabiting their small space in the world. The further he descended into a future of insignificance, the safer he felt. He was secure in his sanity; his wits would never desert him, not when he was so calmly ensconced in his own quiet existence.

Except that they did. He eventually realized that, in carving out his own path in London, he could never own all of it. And so he withdrew from the dank sewers of society, and was soon a different kind of high, soaring over and through his city, his beautiful city, relearning it, reclaiming it, making up for all the time he had wasted drifting in a seven per cent solution.

He smoked sometimes, to calm himself. But he found it increasingly hard to explore his new home with a cigarette in his hand, while staying out of smoke-free areas slowed him down. Delays were less than desirable, so he took to nicotine patches – convenience winning out over pleasure, his daily treks became far more efficient.

His favourite London was a washed out one – pale in the pre-dawn hours, when it was misty and no one else was around. The soft glow of the yet-to-rise sun bathed the brick and stone in a chilling, gorgeous light. It captured the city the way he saw it in his mind’s eye, in his heart – murky and beautiful, with long shadows and murmured secrets.

Only two things kept him from his city, the first being bad weather. Occasionally, there was a torrential downpour that he couldn’t brave or a snow fall so heavy that it chilled him to his bones, his very core. So he stayed in, resenting every rain drop that fell, every snowflake that flurried past his window.

The other hindrance was exhaustion. He would return home and collapse, utterly spent. The nights were worse than the days. He lay in his bed and curled in on himself, mind rotting from boredom, darkness creeping up his spine and swallowing him whole. It left him desperate to see the guts of his city, instead of his thin pillow and the beige wall beyond it. He would never tell, but these times made him ache with a sadness he didn’t understand, an inexplicable sense of loss – to be more precise, the lack of something important, something missing. It was an emptiness that could not be filled with all the street names in London. No matter how often he repeated them to himself – alphabetically, geographically, chronologically, – it stayed, dragging on his heart and muddling his thoughts.  The ache followed him through the nights, creeping into his days. It stained the city, haunting him, leaving traces of his sadness down dark alleys and under dusty eves.

 

Due to cost and ease, he took the tube if it was inconvenient to walk. But the underground grew tiresome, filled with too many people and the stinking crush of their bodies, infringing upon his London, encroaching on his space. He found he preferred taxis, as they were silent, closed off and personal. He could be alone with his city, enjoy the stimulating rush as he passed all the familiar shop fronts and street corners at speed. He missed seeing London’s innards, but it was hardly worth it when they were filled-to-bursting with the city’s cattle, shipping themselves thoughtlessly from place to place; their body’s tense, but their eyes glazed and dull.

Months passed, and he learned all he could from the masses of people. He still split them off into groups, and he still wondered where the children of his city would end up, living in the streets or the numerous buildings that lined them, decrepit or decadent. But he moved on to greener pastures, as it were.

He wondered about the buildings. The great towers, the modern blocks of brick. The warped silhouettes from an older London that he wasn’t a part of.  He catalogued all that he could, starting with the high-rises and winding out from there, leading him further away from the heart of the city until he knew which kind of buildings could be found where, what they were made with and when they were built – just from a look, and perhaps a touch.

He became obsessive. He wanted the city in his mind, in his heart, his veins; he wanted it for his soul. Mostly for practical reasons, but also because he never felt loved like this, for he believed his London loved him back. Loved him as a human who walked the earth within its walls, loved him for being the citizen who took time to learn the city’s quirks and secrets. It was an empty love, but he convinced himself that he felt its appreciation. And so he set out to learn it permanently, to commit it to memory, so that his London would be with him, whether he was within his London or not. He bought numerous maps, and began.

He walked its streets, endlessly. His mnemonic device was his parent house, so he filled it up with London’s roads and lanes and crescents. Its groves and drives and avenues. Soon, his old house wasn’t big enough. It was in London that he began constructing his Palace.

As the streets were tangled and winding, he saw fit to make them the grounds of his construction. City of London was ingrained in the marble steps leading up the front door, its heavy bannisters rich in detail to accommodate everything he knew.  City of Westminster was paired with the shrubs growing along the drive, each flower a street, each insect a bite of information.

Wandsworth, Lambeth and Southwark made up the vast fountain in front of the Palace. The former taking the engravings on the north side, all angles and shapes, the middle taking the south side, which were icons and symbols, while the latter comprised the sculpted column of rock rising up from the centre of the fountain, water flowing from its various adorned spouts.

Camden was a roped off area of assorted lawn ornaments, while Hounslow was the great line of willows surrounding the lake which lay to the east of the Palace. Islington, Brent and Hackney were wrapped up in the stables, the small maze and the vegetable patch.

He studied the landmarks of London, adding his favourites to the sprawling lawns of his mind. Sometimes they were too big, and so he had scaled-down versions – a small London Eye just beyond the maze, while Westminster Palace was added to the stonework round the back.

He went on and on, the grounds of his Palace flourishing, until he had the streets and walkways of London memorized, his own private garden, in which he could stroll at his will. He set his sights on the Thames, and learning all the unmarked, unmapped areas. On his charts, they were grey polygons of reclaimed land. He wanted to know them better than the lazy cartographers who had initially led him clumsily up and down the paved lines of London.

He walked the gentle bends of the river every day for weeks, learning all the ships and all the docks and all the stinking, rotting areas underneath (they all came together to be the lake under the willows). No matter how often he bathed, he couldn’t shake the smell of the mud and pollution and rancid water. Not that he was trying very hard. If he was to know what it was to love London, he would love it for all it had to offer, taking every last bit and fitting it away inside his head. This was what love was like, wasn’t it? Deep admiration for something that occupies the greatest parts of one’s soul? At least, that was what it was to him, making his heart swell and burst, understanding what it was to belong and to _want_ to belong, to find a niche to fit into that was only big enough for him, but was spacious enough for the world, for the sky, for the solar system in which we reside. The biggest, most beautiful place on earth was his for the taking and he grabbed it with both hands, holding on for dear life. There was enough of it to fill his heart and mind and soul. There was finally enough.

 

Until there wasn’t. Until he got distracted. Until he looked at his city and it was too familiar, a feeling he couldn’t shake. He once felt pride when he saw that he knew every inch of a street, but now that he had compartmentalized London, tamed it into a garden, he was itching to find something new, begging for more. But he was to be left wanting, as there wasn’t more, a city can’t grow that fast. He would never be sated by street names again.

He returned to its people and their crimes, desperate for something to occupy him, to hide himself in. They at least changed. They aged. They arrived and departed, the population always in flux.  Only, his time away had changed him. He had been isolated, grown accustomed to his own company, which he had liked very much. Returning to the masses, it was harder to keep a civil tongue, it was a strain to tolerate the slower minds, the ones who didn’t know the city like he did. His wish fulfilled became his burden, and from that point on, he swam against the current. It was unpleasant, yet pleasing. He liked it, although it could still surprise him sometimes, when someone pointed out just how far he’d strayed from the societal norms (he pretended it didn’t, and shook it off. But he knew. London knew). He started looking for more crimes to occupy his mind, furnishing the newly built rooms of his Palace with facts and experiments and results and information that would help him dig into the deepest, ugliest part of London that no one liked to look at.

That was the honest truth about its inhabitants. They saw, but they didn’t observe, because they didn’t want to. They didn’t notice because they went out of their way to not notice. They might not be as staggeringly capable at observing, but they weren’t even trying a little bit.

Everything he loved about the city was that its beauty existed alongside its foul and ugly underbelly.  Something that nobody else seemed to want to acknowledge. While the city was perfect to him, it was tarnished by people, stupid people, who thought they could cherry pick its best features and complain about the rest. These people who claimed to know what love was, why didn’t they understand? It drove him mad. It was London and he, harbouring a quiet resentment for the other twelve million people sharing their space.

 

The resentment faded, and he forgot about it as it wasn’t stored in the Palace. But his link with London grew brittle. The extensive lawns of his mind became slightly fuzzy, as if overgrown and shrouded by a lack of clarity he wasn’t used to. He didn’t have to fight too hard to remember the facts – the names of the streets, the routes and hotspots, but he forgot the small things – the details in which he found solace or joy. He had ceased to be comforted by the sharp edges and round corners, the tiny things he noticed about his great city, his home. He felt put off and mildly repelled, as though an enchantment had been broken. A veil had lifted and the dullness of the city assaulted his every sense.

Scrambling to reprieve his boredom, he now spent his days solidifying the foundations of his knowledge – the basement-cum-library of his Palace – which he hoped would be useful in filling up the rest of the rooms with cases and crimes and how he solved them all. As he fell out of love with London, his focus tightened. Everything knitted together and met at one central point; his entire world was filled with motives and tells and weapons and means and ends – people coming to sticky ends.

If his love for London could contain the solar system, then his need for puzzles could hold a galaxy.  A multitude of galaxies. Perhaps the entire universe. No, it _was_ the entire universe. And like that, the puzzles became his obsession. His first love, London, was only useful if it helped him find solutions. He would never live anywhere else, but he didn’t care to maintain his Palace’s grounds.  

There are chips in the marble stairs now. The shrubs are tangled, the north and south sides of the fountain are mixed and muddled. The branches of the willow trees droop too low into Lake Thames, which is brimming with thick algae. The vegetable patch has turned wild, and the stables are held together by cobwebs. If he tried to walk the maze that he used to know by heart, he might need to take a minute, to think of the correct route, where to find the information he’s looking for. He used to know instantly.

 If he wanted to, he could clear away the dust, but there really are more pressing matters, more important things to be going on with. Better tasks to occupy his time. It wasn’t enough for him, as it turns out. London. Not enough for his mind and heart and soul. He tried to fill himself up with his city, but he was always left starving, his body needing more blood in its veins, but never having enough.  

The puzzles fill him up properly, like London should have. They are his existence. Like a man possessed, his puzzles get put above everything else, including his own creature comforts, because what is the point? It’s all means to an end, it’s all fuel and stimulants and air to breath, to keep him going, to solve the puzzle. Everything else is transport, delivering him across the finish line where the answers reside, the prize, the apple of his eye.

 

He takes London with him wherever he goes, but he leaves it now, untended, to wither and die.

 

When the relationship with his beautiful London grew stale and shattered, he finally became Sherlock Holmes.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! This was just something I did to get words flowing, it's not a serious attempt at... Seriousness. If that makes sense.


End file.
